Best Inspiring Ayn Rand Quotes

Last Updated on July 3, 2022

Ayn Rand, a successful Russian-born American Writer is known for her philosophy which promoted individualism and laissez-faire capitalism.

Rand is popularly known for her major works, which she published Fountainhead and  Atlas Shrugged in 1943 and 1957, respectively. Both the books reflect the theme of objectivism. She is known for her contributions to literature and philosophy.

In this article, you will find some of her best Ayn Rand quotes from her novels and her philosophies.

Let’s get started. 

Best Ayn Rand Quotes from Fountainhead

1. “Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.” – Ayn Rand

2. “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.” – Ayn Rand

3. I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.” – Ayn Rand

4. “Don’t fool yourself, my dear. You’re much worse than a bitch. You’re a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.” – Ayn Rand

5. “Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons – a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.” – Ayn Rand

6. “There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.” – Ayn Rand

7. “Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.” – Ayn Rand

8. “Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.” – Ayn Rand

9. “One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.” – Ayn Rand

10. “Self-respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretence at it.” – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes On Love

11. “Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it – total passion for the total height – you’re incapable of anything less.” – Ayn Rand

12. “To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.” – Ayn Rand

13. “I love you so much that nothing can matter to me – not even you…Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference” – Ayn Rand

14. “Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person’s sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life.” – Ayn Rand

15. “Love is the expression of one’s values.” – Ayn Rand

16. “Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.” – Ayn Rand

17. “Love is our response to our highest values – and can be nothing else.” – Ayn Rand

18. “If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake – and that is a real tribute of love because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.” – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes on Individualism

19. “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” – Ayn Rand

20. “An individualist is a man who says: I will not run anyone’s life – nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone – nor sacrifice anyone to myself.” – Ayn Rand
21. “Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.” – Ayn Rand

22. “Individualism regards man-every man-as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.” – Ayn Rand

23. “Individualism regards man – every man – as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights – and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.” – Ayn Rand

24. “A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him.” – Ayn Rand

25.”No man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others.” – Ayn Rand

26. “A ‘right’…means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.” – Ayn Rand

27. “Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.” – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes on Money

28. “So you think that money is the root of all evil? […] Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?” – Ayn Rand

29. “Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.” – Ayn Rand

30. “Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” – Ayn Rand

31. “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.” – Ayn Rand

32. “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” – Ayn Rand

33. “Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.” – Ayn Rand

Best Ayn Rand Quotes on Happiness

34. “Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” – Ayn Rand

35. “My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.” – Ayn Rand

36. “She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness…” – Ayn Rand

37. “Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.” – Ayn Rand

38. “Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.” – Ayn Rand

Best Ayn Rand Quotes About Government

39. “A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.” – Ayn Rand

40. “A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defence, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force…government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one…reverses its only moral purpose.” – Ayn Rand

41. “Under a proper social system…a private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted…This is the American concept of ‘a government of laws and not of men.” – Ayn Rand

42. “Since the only proper function of a government is to protect man’s rights, it cannot claim title to his life in exchange for that protection.” – Ayn Rand

43. “Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity.” – Ayn Rand

44. “Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.” – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes on Collectivism

45. “Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.” – Ayn Rand

46. “People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.” – Ayn Rand

47. “Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group . . . and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.” – Ayn Rand

48. “Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory . . . both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.” – Ayn Rand

49. “Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.” – Ayn Rand

50. “The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men’s happiness, but by hatred for man . . . hatred of the good for being the good; . . . the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.” – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes Education

51. “The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life — by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past — and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.” – Ayn Rand

52. “The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most hopeful movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass-roots revival of the Montessori system of education—a system aimed at the development of a child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty.” – Ayn Rand

53. “Today, those who didn’t go to college are better informed and less easily fooled than those who did. Of all government undertakings, none has failed so disastrously as public education. The grade-and-high-school teachers blame it on parental influences. The college professors blame it on the teachers. Few, if any, question the content of the courses.” – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes From Anthem

54. “The word “We” is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.” – Ayn Rand

55. “The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them” – Ayn Rand

56. “Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.” – Ayn Rand

57. “Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: “I will it.” – Ayn Rand

58. “And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose…” – Ayn Rand

59. “I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.” – Ayn Rand

60. “I understand that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.” – Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Quotes About Integrity

61. “Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.” – Ayn Rand

62. “There are two principles on which all men of intellectual integrity and goodwill can agree, as a ‘basic minimum,’ as a precondition of any discussion, co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance. . . . They are not axioms, but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he is not fit for an intellectual discussion. These two principles are: a. that emotions are not tools of cognition; b. that no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others.” – Ayn Rand

63. “A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.” – Ayn Rand

64. “There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.” – Ayn Rand

65. “Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.” – Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged Quotes by Ayn Rand

66. “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.” – Ayn Rand

67. “Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.” – Ayn Rand

68. “What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There are two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.” – Ayn Rand

69. “Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong.” – Ayn Rand

70. “If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don’t be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own.” – Ayn Rand

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